rssfeed VS parser

As simcop2387 mentioned, Hacker News’ RSS feed is here → https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Unfortunately, it only includes the title and the submission’s link, no content, which makes it a bit useless if your intension is to actually read the articles and not just the titles, which you can already do by visiting the home page.

Some people have created complementary RSS feeds like this → https://github.com/cixtor/rssfeed#readme

I ported Mozilla’s Readability library to Go a couple of years ago [1] and use it every day to power a custom RSS feed of Hacker News via Reeder [2]. This is not a novelty, many people have ported Readability to different programming languages over the years.

[1] https://github.com/cixtor/readability

[2] https://github.com/cixtor/rssfeed

Thoroughly scraping is challenging, especially in an environment where you don’t have (or want) a JavaScript runtime.

For content extraction, I found the approach the Postlight library takes quite neat. It scores individual html nodes based on some heuristics (text length, link density, css classes). It the selects the nodes with the highest score. [1] I ported it to Swift for a personal read later app.

[1] https://github.com/postlight/parser

I've been working on an enhanced reader mode extension for the last few months. I found that Mercury Reader's parser tool is useful for extracting content. If that's not exactly what you're looking for, readibility is another good option. It's a library used inside Firefox's reader moder that you can use in any project.

I currently have it turned off while I search for better sources, but I have a VM that runs a custom cron script that combines a custom RSS reader, podfox, mercury-parser, and coqui-ai to generate audio podcasts from RSS news feeds. I should probably clean it up and release the script/setup process. With a few tweaks and some AI text-to-speech and a little machine learning audio processing you can get a really good podcast experience from text posts.

It looks like Relay could be updated to convert it locally though, since the parser that it uses appears to be open source.

https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser The only one I need, shit's too good

An alternative would be to extract the plain text from the article's page with either some "readability" API or a library like Mercury Parser: https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser

I haven’t directly compared them, but I have also found mercury parser (https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser) to be very reliable.

Since it turns a website into very plain (X)HTML it‘s fairly easy to use it to make a browsing proxy or automatically produce epub files for e-readers, which is what I do.

Make sure that at the end of the process you have the node and npm executables installed - the http.webpage integration uses the Mercury Parser API to convert web pages to Markdown.

Good luck! Those HTML issues you're coming across are tough and so varied across the web!

I was working with Mercury Parser (pluggable parsing for different sites) in the past.

https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser